Cry from the Deep: The Sinking of the Kursk

Cry from the Deep

The Sinking of the Kursk, the Submarine Disaster That Riveted the World and Put the New Russia to the Ultimate Test

Ramsey Flynn

To Mary Jane and Bill Flynn,

who have always been there and always will be.

And to Betty,

who has sustained me when little else could.

Contents

Preface

1. Wives’ Day

2. Loading Up

3. Endless Spying Game

4. Dangerously Late

5. Getting Under Way

6. Uss Memphis Prowls

7. Shooting Practice

8. Failing to Tame the Fat Girl

9. Killer Blow

10. Struggling for Survival

11. American Dilemma

12. A Worried Fleet

13. White House Situation Room

14. Fleet Breaking Point

15. Emergency Search

16. Rumors Come Ashore

17. Disheartening Signs

18. Western Paralysis

19. Lying to the People

20. The Global Whipsaw

21. Opening The Gates

22. Going International

23. Democracy, Up Close and Personal

24. Keeping the West at Bay

Photographic Insert

25. Down to Business

26. Putin Meets the Families

27. Facing the Nation

28. Summit Meeting

29. Undoing the Big Lie: Kolesnikov’s Cry from the Deep

30. Seeds of Activism

31. Raise the Kursk

32. Naming Names

33. Tell the People the Truth

Postscript: Whose Legacy?

Notes

Searchable Terms

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

PREFACE

When I first proposed this story to a magazine editor in mid-August 2000, the event was only a day old and the world was riveted by the televised images of a rescue in progress. There were reports of trapped sailors knocking from inside a sunken submarine in a shallow area of the Barents Sea, and experts agreed they could be brought out alive. Though the Russians had mysteriously rebuffed foreign-rescue offers, some of those foreigners leaped into action anyway. I was optimistic.

I’d envisioned something like the feel-good story of the long-shot Apollo 13 rescue, only better: saving the Kursk submariners would go down in history as an international bonding experience. Lingering East-West tensions would fade as former enemies joined in a common purpose, pooling the best resources and bravest rescuers to bring those boys out alive. In my eighteen-year career, I’d chronicled more than my share of tragedy. This would be different.

Instead I watched with growing dismay as the Russian government threw a befuddling series of obstacles into the paths of foreign rescuers, and the reports of the submariners’ tapping disappeared.

The difficulty in unraveling this new riddle of why Russia had seemingly sabotaged a rescue of its own men now loomed like an enormous Rubik’s Cube. My stock-in-trade was to untangle complicated stories until I could present the truth. It’s difficult enough with happy outcomes, but now I’d be asking impolite questions of notoriously tight-lipped officials—in a country I’d never been to, in a language I’d never spoken, in a mysterious and complex world of undersea espionage and warfare that I’d always found deeply baffling.

One of my first phone calls was to the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C., where I’d hoped to start getting the proper clearances to work in this former evil empire. What makes you think I can help you with this? asked Yuri Zubarev, the embassy’s press attaché.

Well, what, indeed? As an unaffiliated, independent journalist, I was looking at a yearlong process just to get accredited to report from within Russia. And accreditation was only the first in a series of escalating hurdles. I opted for a business visa—which would afford me no access whatsoever to official press facilities and events—and finally set foot on Russian soil in late October, some seventy-five days after the wreck. But the country was still in a state of shock, with official allegations that an American spy sub rammed the Kursk just reaching a shrill crescendo.

At the end of my first week I was wandering around the streets of St. Petersburg in a cold rain, gamely employing my twelve-word vocabulary in a vain attempt to find the apartment of a helpful American expat with translator connections. After an hour or so in the steady downpour, I reluctantly called him on my cell phone. But standing at a five-way intersection where all the signs were written in an alien alphabet, I still could not match his careful instructions; he had to head out into the rain himself to come rescue me. It seemed everything about this project was going to be very hard work.

The ensuing years demanded that every success be hard-won: five reporting trips to Russia; many hundreds of interviews; countless ran-sackings through online Russian media archives; carefully arranged discussions with on-scene military officials; generous technical advisers and dedicated translators every step of the way—for three and a half years. And this was only for the Russian side of the story.

This narrative account is more than 90 percent factual. The remainder is informed scenario, mostly involving events experienced by the men whose lives were lost. In an effort to craft these sequences responsibly, I have tried to reconstruct them with the help of forensic findings, recovered tapes of onboard dialogues, notes found on submariners’ bodies, ships’ logs, Russian naval protocol, family interviews, the firsthand testimony of key participants, and intensive professional guidance.

Most of the three-hundred-plus subjects I’ve interviewed for this book agreed to stay on the record. Though their contributions are not attributed within the narrative, I have compiled a liberal accounting in a separate appendix at the book’s end.

Some general explanations on sources: While I have sifted many thousands of documents about this tragedy—including countless news reports and narrative treatments and other original documents that have never been publicized—I have tried wherever possible to get close to the subjects themselves for firsthand interviews. Perhaps the most consistently maddening aspect of this story was that the truth always appeared to be a moving target, one in which even those closely involved routinely resorted to speculation about what had happened around them. The facts persistently refused to sit still. For this reason, I repeatedly interviewed as many subjects for key scenes as possible, occasionally subjecting some poor souls to multiple rounds of questioning.

Reconstructed dialogues among living persons come from my own interviews with the subjects involved, or occasionally from published interviews conducted by other journalists. Very infrequently—and only in exchanges of low consequence—I have resorted to descriptions from intimates who either witnessed the exchanges or received the accounts from participants at a later date.

In some cases that describe a living subject’s interior thoughts, many of the rules mentioned above apply. But in some instances, my reconstruction is also based on statements later expressed in interviews that, in my judgment, seemed credibly applied within the moment of dramatic events that form the narrative.

Also in rare cases, I have used firsthand material from subjects who could not allow their names to be published. This includes all dialogues onboard the Kursk and between the Kursk and the Peter the Great, once the sub entered the open sea on its way to the exercise. Those records come from a source close to the Russian investigation.

All weather descriptions come from the records of reporting stations responsible for the times and places described.

Most accounts of actions among key Western actors in the drama are based on my interviews with the subjects themselves, many of whom spoke publicly about the Kursk event for the first time. This includes former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, who used his own verbatim notes from the first meeting between Presidents Clinton and Putin several weeks after the tragedy to give me an accurate account of that meeting.

For the book’s formidable technical challenges, I relied most heavily on Lars Hanson, a retired American naval commander and engineer whom I’d stumbled upon while aiding National Geographic Television’s own Kursk account in the spring of 2002. I’d worked with a number of other technical advisers with limited success, but Lars’s moxie was of an entirely different order; he rolled up his sleeves and feverishly worked through the Kursk tragedy’s many mysteries, drawing on a stunning range of high-level skill sets. There were many times when I simply felt like Lars’s legman, supplying him with key bits of information as he educated me in the world of American and Russian submarines. He certainly could have written this book by himself if he’d wanted to.

But for all of his tireless guidance, it must be said that I sometimes chose advice with which Lars disagreed, knowing full well that I did so at my peril. Which is to say I accept full responsibility for any errors in this document.

This project’s most highly skilled American translator is a U.S. Navy chief petty officer who contacted me in early 2002 and initially offered me his fact-checking services gratis. I suspect that Robert Rip Burns soon came to worry over what he’d gotten himself into, as I shamelessly lured him into ever more time-consuming translation projects of Russian documents that kept finding their way into my possession. The man has never told me no, though he’s certainly had a right to. Rip routinely provided precious gems of information never published in the West, and over time his work constituted meaningful original reporting.

On the Russian side, my confused wanderings on the rainy streets of St. Petersburg that day in November 2000 bore remarkable fruit. My expat friend’s wife connected me with a formidably talented translator/fixer. Anna Korovina, who had been a high-school exchange student for a year in Illinois, quickly displayed a keen natural interest in this effort. She understood my desire to talk to everybody involved, and consistently risked her regular job to make time for my endless reporting needs. Anna had been born and raised in Murmansk (the Arctic hub of Russia’s submarine world), she lived and worked in naval-centric St. Petersburg, and she had friends in Moscow. Suddenly, I had couches to sleep on in all the primary locations. Anna quickly tuned into my need to defeat the Russian habit of hoarding precious contact information, as she automatically remembered to ask for the phone numbers and e-mail addresses of key targets at the end of each interview. She also fended off the persistent scoldings of the many Cold War military dinosaurs we encountered, who tried to convince her that she was aiding and abetting the enemy. Anna’s impassioned defenses often converted some of these same critics into our best sources, whom she continued to pursue in the long periods between my visits. With my scripted interviews in hand, Anna quizzed many of these subjects on her own. In one remarkable case, she successfully tracked down obscure contact information for families of each key member of the Kursk’s torpedo team, winning us interviews that helped humanize these little-known men who’d been saddled with an impossibly dangerous task. For that and many similar such exclusives, I came to trust Anna as Cry from the Deep’s Special Correspondent.

For an overall technical review, I relied on the careful and wise reading of U.S. Rear Admiral (Ret.) Thomas Evans, whose knowledge of and love for the world of submarines is quite nearly boundless. Early in our correspondence, Admiral Tom took personal time to give my two young boys and their friends a one-on-one tour of the Cold War Submarines Museum at the Smithsonian’s Institute of American History, where he serves part-time as a docent. He was a patient and avuncular delight that day, and remained so throughout his skillful work on this book.

Some important outside contributors should also be highlighted up front. While I had remarkable access to all of the living characters in the first chapters, Olga Kolesnikova, wife of the submariner who wrote the poignant note that gives this book its title, refused to cooperate with my interview requests. (In a brief personal exchange, she expressed offense that I’d spent too much time interviewing others about her husband, instead of coming to her first for the real story.) I have portrayed Olga through the use of voluminous video material and the testimony of others, but owe a special debt to prominent Russian journalist and friend Nikolay Cherkashin. It is his book, Into the Abyss: The Loss of the Kursk: Timeline, Theories, Fates, that provides some of the key missing moments in Olga’s relationship with her husband.

I have also relied on some of the original reporting of another prominent Russian Kursk author, Vladimir Shigin. His time line of events surrounding the Kursk’s demise held up very well over time, and he was able to interview a number of key subjects exclusively. His fine book on the tragedy, Empty Mooring, will stand for years as among the most definitive.

And I must doff my cap to British TV journalist Robert Moore, who was based in Moscow at the time of the disaster and captured it from the ground up. His book, A Time to Die, provided an unparalleled depiction of British and Norwegian rescuers attempting to help the Russians. Moore negotiated exclusive access to one of the Western rescue vessels as it raced to the scene, and reported on moments that could not be adequately replicated by someone who wasn’t there. In certain sequences that depict exchanges between Russian officials and the head of the on-site Norwegian diving operation, Moore’s terrific material is my only source.

Though I hope Cry from the Deep will find its place among the defining accounts of this pivotal moment in international relations, I am nevertheless convinced there are truths about the Kursk case that have eluded me. My publisher sympathizes with this lingering concern, and has agreed to support a Web site (http://www.cryfromthedeep.com) where updated facts of this case will be posted as they emerge.

1

WIVES’ DAY

VIDYAYEVO NAVAL GARRISON, PIER EIGHT

SUNDAY AFTERNOON, JULY 9, 2000

The wives hush when they first spot the giant black hulk. It’s more squat than in the photographs they’ve seen, yet somehow more imposing. It looks like a capsized ocean liner draped in a shroud. The three couples murmur as they file out of the shuttle bus past the armed guards and hear the popping of bay water slapping the submarine’s hull. The dark colossus dwarfs them as they draw closer, and the collars of the wives’ coats flap in the diesel-scented breeze. Dmitry Kolesnikov, or Dima, guides his wife Olga up the steel gangway to the sub’s broad deck. He wants to make sure she feels comfortable meeting his beloved metal mistress. He wants his new bride to love her, too.

Olga is mystified. Why does her husband love this thing? Why do he and his friends speak of it with a reverence that makes the wives jealous? Why have they all staked their futures on $100-a-month salaries in a remote little fjord in the Arctic Circle? For this?

Standing in front of the Kursk’s imposing conning tower, Olga shields her eyes from a sky brightly veiled with high sweeps of ice-crystal clouds. At fifty-two degrees, the weather feels oddly autumnal, even though it’s a Sunday afternoon in July. Olechka! says Dima, using her pet name while boyishly tugging her aside to proudly describe the Kursk’s topside fittings, quickly losing her in the inevitable jargon. She regards the vessel’s great red crest emblazoned at the front of the central tower. The crest—a golden double-headed eagle that evokes Russia’s wariness about foreign invaders from all directions—is already bleached from its few storied voyages.

The couples have been bonding into a submariners’ family, a very useful thing in Vidyayevo, the spartan garrison town on the Kola Peninsula where they all must live. Vidyayevo’s cinder-block apartment buildings are rudimentary, riddled with peeling paint, power outages, heating problems, leaky plumbing, and water shortages. It is the kind of place where people wake up on dark winter mornings to find their teapots filled with ice. Life in Vidyayevo is all about making do. When the few shops close in the evenings, a spontaneous marketplace emerges in the treeless spaces between the apartment buildings, with a few entrepreneurial men selling sodas, beer, and cigarettes out of their jacket pockets, supplementing the handful of small kiosks that keep later hours.

So these loose-knit families share cars and sometimes apartments and often foodstuffs and tools and videos. For many of the town’s nine thousand people, such communal habits make Vidyayevo a socially intimate place. The younger wives pride themselves on their collective culinary ventures, especially when making a group stew—one contributing, say, beets or ham; another cabbage, or perhaps the prized mushrooms that appear after the late-summer rains, like manna springing from beneath the dwarf conifers and wild berry bushes that hug the rocky hillsides in a Darwinian struggle for Arctic sunlight.

Such routines have forged a stubborn indomitability in Russia’s submarine community here, which clings proudly to a few terrifying prowlers of the deep that help assure their motherland’s increasingly tenuous claim to world power. The Kursk is a potent leftover from the vast Soviet empire that stood toe-to-toe against an imperialist West for seventy years, and senior state officials believe the giant submarine still has an important future in helping to preserve Russia’s place in the international pecking order. The six-year-old Kursk is among a shrinking handful of supersubs that can silently traverse the ocean depths and unleash a nuclear strike against an enemy navy’s carrier battle group any time the Kremlin gives the orders. The young men posted to the Kursk guarantee that such orders will be carried out.

This hull will be my blanket while I am away, says Dima as he leads Olga through an interior passageway on one of the Kursk’s upper decks. It will keep me warm and safe while I dream of you. The two take turns with the video camera they’ve brought along to record the day’s visit. With the other two couples wandering off to their husbands’ assigned compartments, Dima shows Olga the mysterious workings of his cloistered world. Olga is already getting accustomed to the strange scents—a subtle blend of solvents and mechanical lubricants—as Dima beckons her forward. She pans the camera across a cul-de-sac of control panels.

Ty zdyes komanduyesh? Olga asks. You are in charge here? It is a claustrophobic space, painted a wan yellow-green, crammed with pipes, wires, switches, meters, and gauges. Dima carefully ducks his head around a low-hanging piece of overhead equipment as he describes the console from which he oversees the eight-man turbine crew that runs the Kursk’s forward turbine compartment. He explains broadly how the console tracks the performance of his section of the propulsion system, including the giant turbines that dominate the decks below him. Sensing her bewilderment, Dima suddenly becomes animated, showing Olga how he can recline on a rise in the floor and nap with his legs braced against the wall. Olga gasps at the contorted arrangement, but Dima boasts about his clever adaptation. And if there is an emergency, he begins, then abruptly leaps from the floor and, darting his head left and right, hissing as if he’s spitting bullets for punctuation—fut! fut! fut!—shows Olga how he can snap into action with the shrill call of a battle alarm.

Moments later, Dima takes the camera and zooms in on Olga dancing toward him, Broadway-style, clicking her fingers as she performs a series of half pirouettes. Take me with you to the sea, she pleads playfully.

I can’t, Dima says. It’s a bad omen to have a woman on the sub.

I promise to smile at everybody, she says, dancing closer, her smartly bobbed, hennaed hair perfectly framing the girlish pout that blooms across her lips.

Well, Dima teases, if you’re going to smile at everybody, there can be no talk about having you on the sub.

Olga’s luminous face fills the camera frame. I promise I will smile only at your superiors so you can get promoted, she persists. And you will become an admiral.

Da? asks Dima. Yes?

Da, answers Olga.

Nyet!

Sometimes Dima finds it hard to believe this dancing goddess is his wife. He always considered himself an awkward galoot of a man, spirited and romantic but cursed with a soft outer layer of baby fat, his red hair and pale complexion conspiring to keep him in the good friends category with the young women in his life. His shyness around them had kept him returning to the same fiery-tempered high school girlfriend his parents disapproved of, but who was always there when Dima came home on leave, stealing away with him even amid her second failing marriage.

Inna had always wanted to marry Dima, and would do it even now, but he refused to quit the submarine service and become a commercial seafarer, despite Inna’s insistence that doing so would give them a comfortable life.

Dmitry Romanovich Kolesnikov had foundered about briefly after high school in his hometown of St. Petersburg, where he’d distinguished himself as a party boy nicknamed Koleso, the Russian word for wheel. An academic achiever with a love of poetry and the classic Russian writers, he cultivated an endearing habit of coining comic patronymic Russian middle names for his party mates, with whom he belted out the Soviet-subversive songs of his favorite Russian rock group, DDT. He was especially close to his high school friend and drinking mate Maksim Guskov, whose reputation as an incorrigible bad boy made him even more unpopular with the Kolesnikov parents than Inna was. But Dima treasured these relationships, and in those final post–high school months of 1990 he felt whipsawed between the social comforts of St. Petersburg and the austere career path blazed by his father, who retired from the service as a highly respected captain first rank. Eventually Dima retreated to his room at his parents’ apartment, and after days of stewing finally came to a decision: he’d join the navy. Overweight, he quickly embraced a strict diet of yogurt and cucumbers that lasted for weeks, losing enough of the two-hundred-plus pounds from his six-three frame to make the cut.

After five years in the naval academy, Kolesnikov and his two closest classmates won assignments to the motherland’s finest sub, the Kursk. The trio found themselves virtually penned up in Vidyayevo—one of the remote Arctic locations where the farthest reach of the Gulf Stream keeps the fjords ice-free—a place so lacking in diversions that alcohol fueled the off-duty hours of nearly every unmarried officer. Armed mostly with bottles of Mr. Officer–brand vodka, Dima fell hard, and too many of his days disappeared into a fog. He would get into fistfights while carousing with naval college classmate Rashid Aryapov, but their more diplomatic classmate, Sergey Lubushkin, would usually manage to steer them clear of bigger trouble.

Lubushkin eventually homed in on an attractive young woman in a nearby town, and one night he persuaded her to join him and his friends at a café there. When the flattered young woman ordered something from the menu, the three men suddenly made excuses about needing to wash their hands and departed for the bathroom. Once there, they pooled their money, ensuring that they could collectively afford Sergey’s date.

For Dima Kolesnikov, the personal loan of a few rubles turned into a wise investment. Sergey and his Olga soon married, and the newlywed Olga Lubushkina often found herself cooking for Dima as a houseguest—and occasionally for Rashid as well. The good-natured young wife sometimes joked that her marriage to Sergey was a three-for-one deal.

Dima often stopped by the Lubushkins’ cozy apartment after evenings of drinking with Rashid, lounging in a favorite chair and talking for hours. Olga Lubushkina usually enjoyed Dima’s company, especially since he often contributed to meals. But there were times when he would settle in for too many hours, just to indulge the comfort of home and family and conversation. Sometimes Sergey had to tell Dima when it was time to leave. Today is not a visiting day, he would candidly tell Dima. I am tired of you. Sometimes Dima would playfully protest, saying he was always welcome because he had a special arrangement with your wife. But as Dima Kolesnikov would reluctantly slip out the door, Olga Lubushkina would worry, knowing that Dima probably subsisted on bits of fruit and cigarettes and alcohol back at his apartment, a dimly lit lair with nothing for decoration except his clothes, which hung on nails punched through peeling brown wallpaper into the concrete.

Dima’s parents worried, too, especially about how their son’s drinking might jeopardize his naval career. Dima’s mother even asked Olga Lubushkina to look after her son and to tell her how Dima was doing.

The concern was well founded. By the summer of 1999, Kursk captain Gennady Lyachin had heard enough about Kolesnikov’s drinking escapades, and he finally issued a stern ultimatum to the otherwise promising captain-lieutenant: If Kolesnikov couldn’t control his drinking, Lyachin said, I think it will be time for you to leave the sub. The Kursk had just been tapped for a particularly critical long-distance mission, Lyachin told him. But one more drunken stunt, one more report of a fist-fight, and Kolesnikov would be left behind in Vidyayevo.

A rattled Kolesnikov retreated on leave to St. Petersburg, and slipped back into his old familiar ways. He looked up his dark-haired Inna. He downed more Mr. Officer with his wayward friend Maksim. He told Maksim that the drinking up north was the dominant form of recreation, though fleet conditions were hellish. He talked of how he loved the Kursk, but resented how the brutal post-Soviet military cuts forced him to jury-rig repairs. At one point he turned to Maksim and smiled over the way his naval comrades applauded his resourcefulness. Up north, he said, my comrades call me ‘Golden.’

Well, no matter what they say about you up there, Maksim joked, you’ll always be ‘Rust’ to me.

Despite his continued drinking, Dima’s parents sensed he was ready to make a change. They persuaded him that he needed to get decoded from alcohol. Dima’s mother had plans for him if he could clean up his act: with her doctorate in chemistry, Irina Kolesnikova worked at a nearby grade school, and she’d spotted a pretty young biology teacher there, also named Olga, who was recently divorced. After a newly sobered Dima returned to Vidyayevo to join the Kursk’s long-distance mission, his mother sought out the soft-spoken teacher, Olga Borisova, and proposed an introduction. Olga had mixed feelings about the idea of attaching her future to a career navy man, but eventually she agreed to meet him.

Several months later, Dima returned home late on New Year’s Eve to mark the coming millennium and, at his mother’s insistence, dressed quickly and attended a celebration at his high school. When his mother introduced him to Olga, the awkward Dima was utterly tongue-tied. What could such a beautiful woman possibly see in him?

Olga Borisova quickly appraised the tall man before her. Now a more robust 225 pounds, Dima had outgrown his jacket and pants. She thought he looked a bit like an oversized puppy. Olga smiled. They walked off and attempted conversation, but Kolesnikov seemed so awkward that Olga wondered if the harsh conditions of the North—too much male company, too few creature comforts—had robbed him of any social skills he might have had.

But Olga agreed to see him again despite her first impressions, until Kolesnikov’s impaired manner of courtship bottomed out while they were riding the metro in St. Petersburg. At one point the subway train stopped abruptly, sending the passengers collapsing into one another. Trying to protect Olga, the towering Kolesnikov grabbed the back of her jacket collar, dangling her in front of the other passengers like a kitten.

They agreed to stop seeing each other, but Olga soon found herself missing this clumsy but strong, kind guy.

Dima called and said he hoped he could see her. Then he called again. When he returned to St. Petersburg, he confessed that her teacherly manner had made him feel ill at ease, and that this impediment to their relationship must be immediately fixed. They began meeting every evening after Olga’s classes, often heading to cafés, strolling the picturesque riverbanks, and ordering champagne, even though Dima’s hard-won sobriety prevented him from sharing it with